This post is excellent—thank you for writing and sharing. ❤️
Regarding this suggestion:
“Given the unilateralist’s curse, perhaps there should be some central forum for EA funders to coordinate / agree upon policies with an optics perspective in mind.”
I think this would be hugely helpful, and that such a forum should be open and accessible to the rest of the EA community. I agree that SBF and Dustin+Cari have made amazing strides and are funding generally awesome things, but there’s something unsettling about them being able to unilaterally move the needle so significantly. They hire staff and researchers, and I think that’s wonderful (since determining where to deploy money effectively is one of the hardest problems we face), but one proposal to move the community more in line with what you had suggested would be a donor voting system.
Imagine Open Phil has its team of dozens of researchers write up proposals that then get widely distributed among the EA community—some researchers advocating more spending in biorisk, others on public health, etc. - and then members of the EA community vote on which proposal they think would be most effective. OP’s yearly budget for giving could then be spent proportionally according to the votes that each proposal receives. This has the benefits of incorporating the wisdom of the crowd (enlisting the help of tens of thousands of intelligent, thoughtful EAs rather than on the few dozen OP researchers themselves), while also acting as a yearly referendum on the values of EA. Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out concretely how much money EA would dedicate to each cause area if we were all collectively voting on where to spend it?
It’s kind of like a reverse donor lottery—everyone pools their money, then you collectively determine where to spend it, knowing that your preferred cause area might not be the one that’s favored by others, but trusting that tens of thousands of EAs are smarter than one.
A core issue with “voting” is that it’s not hard to change the voting pool (this is a whole other side to the coin no one has stirred everyone up with a post about, because I guess it’s less visceral than being infiltrated by stealthy predators). The incentives to change the voting pool would be so vast, and the institutional demands to regulate it are so large and don’t exist, that the system will collapse almost immediately.
I agree that that’s a difficult issue. I also think that even if that could be solved, current decision-making processes lead to better decisions than this proposal would.
This post is excellent—thank you for writing and sharing. ❤️
Regarding this suggestion:
“Given the unilateralist’s curse, perhaps there should be some central forum for EA funders to coordinate / agree upon policies with an optics perspective in mind.”
I think this would be hugely helpful, and that such a forum should be open and accessible to the rest of the EA community. I agree that SBF and Dustin+Cari have made amazing strides and are funding generally awesome things, but there’s something unsettling about them being able to unilaterally move the needle so significantly. They hire staff and researchers, and I think that’s wonderful (since determining where to deploy money effectively is one of the hardest problems we face), but one proposal to move the community more in line with what you had suggested would be a donor voting system.
Imagine Open Phil has its team of dozens of researchers write up proposals that then get widely distributed among the EA community—some researchers advocating more spending in biorisk, others on public health, etc. - and then members of the EA community vote on which proposal they think would be most effective. OP’s yearly budget for giving could then be spent proportionally according to the votes that each proposal receives. This has the benefits of incorporating the wisdom of the crowd (enlisting the help of tens of thousands of intelligent, thoughtful EAs rather than on the few dozen OP researchers themselves), while also acting as a yearly referendum on the values of EA. Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out concretely how much money EA would dedicate to each cause area if we were all collectively voting on where to spend it?
It’s kind of like a reverse donor lottery—everyone pools their money, then you collectively determine where to spend it, knowing that your preferred cause area might not be the one that’s favored by others, but trusting that tens of thousands of EAs are smarter than one.
Love you all!
A core issue with “voting” is that it’s not hard to change the voting pool (this is a whole other side to the coin no one has stirred everyone up with a post about, because I guess it’s less visceral than being infiltrated by stealthy predators). The incentives to change the voting pool would be so vast, and the institutional demands to regulate it are so large and don’t exist, that the system will collapse almost immediately.
I agree that that’s a difficult issue. I also think that even if that could be solved, current decision-making processes lead to better decisions than this proposal would.